Until very recently, bumblebees were unable to fly according to our best models of aerodynamics.
BULLSHIT!!!
I was trying to not comment on this old canard, but this is the third comment in this thread saying this and I couldn't take it any more.
When exactly is "very recently"? "Best models" according to whom?
It is true that under one simple approximation of fluid mechanics -- the one attributed to Bernoulli that discounts non-linear effects, which makes it easy for high-school students to analyse -- insects' wing-loading is too high to be explained. This doesn't even come close to being "our best models of aerodynamics".
If you didn't learn simple fluid mechanics in high-school, blame it on your pathetic school system. After all it's just plain conservation of energy and momentum. If you feel like doing some research, look up the Navier-Stokes equation -- from the 19th century.
So Hahnemann diluted the substance. I mean, really diluted.... the medicine "remembers" that the stuff was there! (And the more dilute the solution is, the more powerful it is
You left out an important step: after diluting the solution infinitely, you dissolve sugar in it, and then let the water evaporate. You see, the water transfers its memory of the substance to the sugar!
After that all that's left is to make little balls of the sugar, put them in little blue glass capsules, stick a fancy latin name on it, then laugh all the way to the bank.
Computer science is not a science at all, but a pseudoscience. I am not trolling...
I got my bachelor's, master's and PhD in CS, and was university faculty for a couple of years and still can't bring myself to say Computer Science out loud. I think of CS theory as part of math, and the rest is just hacking (or writing code). Not that I'm complaining, writing code is a huge amount
of fun and I get paid a ridiculous amount of money for just doing what I do in my spare time anyway!
When I was in high school (circa 1981), I borrowed an old, book-sized anthology of "Amateur Scientist" columns from a friend.
Don't forget, folks, all the Amateur Scientist columns have been put together into one CD-ROM! The ISBN is 0-9703476-0-X and a bunch of places have it.
The columns are all in HTML.
Those hand-drawn schematics of the experiments are beautiful.
Remember those electronic kits everyone had as a kid from Radio Shack? You know, you could build all sorts of neat things with capacitors and resistors and stuff. Who has those now? I want a really good one to play with.
Why do you want a "kit"? Just get the resistors, capacitors etc. from any electronics supplier. Digikey, Jameco, and a whole bunch of others. If you need
circuit ideas, there are lots of books of the "101 Fun Electronics Projects" type.
My rights are mine, and there's nothing the FSF can do about them. The FSF fights for the rights of the copyright holders of the GPLed software to force their viewpoints upon others.
I don't think that the writers of software should be forced to release their source code. I certainly don't think that people have a right to force them to do so.
You, sir (or madam):
are an idiot
have never written any code
I write code. Code under the GPL. The GPL allows me to decide how my code may be used. It allows me to say, "I believe no one should be deprived of the right to look at my code. You can only benefit from my code -- say, by using it in your project -- if your customers have the same rights that I'm giving you."
Don't like the restrictions I put on my code? Fine -- don't use my code.
Nobody is being forced to do anything (or have any viewpoints forced upon them) because I chose to release my code under the GPL. Micros**t will put much greater restrictions on you if you want to use their code, but do you hear idiots like the author of that comment bitch and moan about Micros**t?
Beta testers are commonly defined by their contracts/livenses as employees and forbidden from distributing copies of the beta software. So, Lindows has a real point here.
Bullshit!
Last time I checked, the people in the QA and testing department didn't pay the company for the privilege.
If Person X pays Lindows (and $99 isn't a "nominal" sum) for the privilege of running their Linux distribution, they're a customer and not an employee.
I bought a copy of a book on how to make methamphetamines from this bookstore. In a raid on a meth lab, the cops found this book. In the trashcan outside, they found an envelope from the bookstore.
Now the cops want the bookstore to give them a list of all people who bought the book. Where's probable cause? Why should the cops know anything about my reading habits?
If we live in a climate where unpleasant books we buy bring us to the attention of the State, do we still have freedom of expression?
The State no longer will need to ban books. Ashcroft merely says "We will be subpoena'ing all bookstore records for purchasers of Book X."
As the article says, books are different from fertilizer.
The 1st Amendment rights being protected are those of the author of the book.
I have the right to write a book on "How To Make Methamphetamine".
You have the right to buy and read this book. In a raid on a meth lab, the cops found this book. Now if the state can, in the investigation of this crime (running a meth lab), subpoena the records of the bookstore to get a list of everyone who bought "How To Make Methamphetamine", they know you bought that book even though you have no connection at all with the crime, and were never a suspect.
I think you'll agree that this will tend to make you not buy that book. Your privacy has been invaded.
And this impacts my freedom to write and publish that book.
Any restriction on writing, publishing, selling, and lending books will infringe authors' First Amendment rights. When we pass laws that infringe, we must be very sure that there is a clear and compelling reason to do so, viz. "shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theatre". Routine fact-gathering during a criminal investigation does not qualify (IMHO).
(Note: your video renting records are protected thanks to the Clarence Thomas confirmation brouhaha.)
Ex-squeeze me? If ice were 1/3 the density of water, would 8/9th of an iceberg be below the waterline?
Of course this doesn't change the main point that if we were to add to the ocean a block of ice 3250 km square by 200 m thick it wouldn't really raise the sea-level.
Actually, there's a report out now which discusses in detail the amount of information bin Laden had concerning the architectural structure of the WTC. After the original attack in '93(?) failed Al Qaeda studied the plans for the WTC. They did a thorough analysis of the best point to crash a large airplane into the building to start a chain reaction collapse.
Reference, please.
"I heard" that bin Laden was surprised at the total collapse of the towers.
Somebody owns the assets of those defunct aircraft companies, even if they're no longer supporting the airplanes
No - no one can be found. There are many airplanes from "The Golden Age" (the 20s and 30s) which are orphans. If you happen to own one of them (perhaps the only one still flying) you need FAA-certified parts. (Unless you want to fly the airplane in the "experimental" category which means you can't carry passengers or offer instruction except in a few limited cases.) For example, the "New Standard D-25" of the late 20s.
Then there are STCs - Supplemental Type Certificates. These are authorized post-production modifications. Getting an STC accepted by the FAA is expensive. For example, an STC might allow you to run an OX-5 in a JN-4 Jenny on "blue" 100LL fuel instead of "green" 135 (hypothetical example, I have no idea what an OX-5 likes to drink). If it's not a popular STC, it's possible that the company went defunct and no one bought the STC. If you now want to use blue gas in your Jenny, you can't use the data that's already been given to the FAA proving that it's safe (that was the basis the original STC was issued on) -- you have to start from scratch.
The important things about this: i) no owner can be found (and it provides for a 60 day search period) and ii) the data will be released under FOIA.
... runs a ham-style system with a huge antenna, and spends hours a day chatting with remote buddies. The interference from the system wreaks havoc on the entire neighborhood telephone, cable, and broadcast systems.... But despite repeated calls to the FCC from Dave and many of his neighbors, nothing is ever done.
Do you (or this Dave) know for a fact that this guy is
a ham; and
is operating outside the assigned limits for amateur radio?
The interference could be coming from that new cell tower or that police station or...
Also, most consumer electronic gadgets are pieces of crap when it comes to selectivity and resistance to interference from signals outside their band.
instead of devising ways to destroy damaging emails that you send we should instead focus on not sending damaging emails.
Especially since there is no way to prevent it. The article glibly talks about "disabling screen capture" -- how? Maybe on some closed proprietary systems you can; but if I'm on Unix, I can always grab a screendump using xwd (if on X11) or script (if using a plain text connection). They're being blinded by the paradigm of Windows, which is that the displaying program is completely responsible for printing/saving etc.
How easily they forget the fundamental axiom of copy protection: if the user can see it, the user can record/copy/save it.
I could just point a camera at the screen and take a picture....
they would rather have BBC BASIC (oh, wait, VB _is_ BASIC rofl:)
Hey waitaminnit!!! I got my hands on an Acorn BBC Micro, back in '83 or '84... yes, it was called Basic but it was Basic in name only. Control structures, strings, and a really nice way to put in asm code in-line. The 6502 -- ah, now there was a nice architecture. Beaten only by the PDP-11. I wish I'd made backups of my code though....
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 00:07:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) mod_bwlimited/0.8 PHP/4.0.6 DAV/1.0.2 mod_log_bytes/0.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.4 OpenSSL/0.9.6
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>404 Not Found</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Not Found</H1>
The requested URL/cool.html was not found on this server.<P>
<P>Additionally, a 404 Not Found
error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
<HR>
<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.20 Server at www.masenko-media.net Port 80</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>
(No Micros**t anywhere on these machines. Cheers!)
OpenBSD has had its share of security flaws just like every other system.
But I notice you don't even attempt to list them.
Exercise: how many OpenBSD security flaws exist (or have existed) where the weakness was exploited before the team fixed it? What has the severity of the flaw been compared to flaws that have been found in other systems>
Any program ftp/httpd/smtp, that has a security flaw, effects ANY UNIX based system that uses it.
There are no programs called ftp, httpd or smtp. FTP, SMTP and HTTP are protocols for which there are many implementations; rarely does a protocol have a bug.
Implementations of these protocols may have bugs.
So it makes sense to talk of Apache or Sendmail having a bug, but not httpd since there's no such thing.
If one particular OS distribution -- one of the *BSDs or a Linux distribution -- runs BIND as root, and another runs it as a user with no privileges except to read files in one particular part of the filesystem, then a flaw in BIND is obviously much more severe in the former than in the latter.
With OpenBSD, when you run BIND you're not just running BIND version 4, you're running a version of BIND 4 that has been audited by the OpenBSD team for flaws. (This is why OpenBSD is still using BIND4 and will continue to do so for a while: the code has been audited, and it works perfectly well providing DNS. Why "upgrade" when the old version isn't missing anything you need?)
All the code that is part of a standard OpenBSD install has been audited. If Apache is found to have a bug, it is not necessarily true that Apache on OpenBSD has a bug. And unfortunately bug fixes that the OpenBSD team makes in standard daemons don't always get accepted into the mainstream code for it.
UWB is... a series of very short electrical pulses... on ALL frequencies simultaneously.
UWB requires ultra-low power... [it is]
a signal that can't be detected and doesn't interfere.
Here goes: Bullshit!
He (or whoever he got this story from) needs to read a little bit of signal processing. Yes, it sounds very nice, and you can build it, and it's all true... if there's only one such device. You see, what this does to other users of spectrum is raise the noise floor just a bit. No big deal.
But what happens if there's a whole bunch of these devices? Well, let's say you're an FCC licensed user of spectrum. You've been allocated a certain bandwidth. Your channel capacity depends on the bandwidth and the noise floor. If your noise floor goes up, your channel capacity goes down.
Where did that lost channel capacity go? It's being used by these "UWB" devices. As evil as the FCC is, we do need some arbiter of the EM spectrum.
Look into Thomson's original measure of the charge of a single electron. His experiment was extremely clever, but in the calculations he forgot to take into account the viscosity of air.
Which original measure? He knows about viscosity of air in his study of falling water droplets formed in a Wilson cloud chamber by ionisation caused by radium, since he uses Stokes' law for viscous drag of a spherical object. (Millikan later did the oil-drop experiment, where he had to account for the fact that at the scale of the oil drops, air's viscosity needs to be corrected.)
I think the point he
was trying to make is that most people don't want to be bothered with source code they just want a program to
work.
Indeed; the corollary is that if they "just want
a program to work" there are lots of those out there. Of course they might crash all the time, or they might actually cost money.
Life is full of trade-offs. If you want to use free software because of all its plusses - robustness, freedom to hack it, lack of money, whatever - you might have to put up with some pain like building from source. (Although it could be argued that with a complete set of development tools that every free operating system - all the Linux distributions, all the BSDs - comes with, building from source is no pain at all.)
Too often we forget that being in the free software world, whether as a user or a developer, involves a slightly different set of rules from the Micros**t world.
... differential GPS. Very simplified, you put several GPSes (or their antennae) in
different places, take readings and figure out the average location.
You want to know your position accurately in real-time. You can't "average" - you put a GPS receiver in a very precisely known location, then you receive the GPS signals and figure out the error in each satellite's signal. Since these errors are well-correlated both spatially and temporally, you can broadcast the corrections to nearby aircraft (or missiles). They apply the corrections to the satellites' signals before solving the equations to get the position.
However, satellites can be turned off, even selectively over certain parts of the world. If you were an ordinary sort of paranoid military bloke, would you trust the US not to? DGPS doesn't help you if the birds are silent.
Think about it, every airline in
the world (for example) is dependent on a navagation system run by the US military.
Er - not exactly. GPS is still not approved in the US as "sole means of navigation." Most new airliners will use a nav system that takes input from many sensors - GPS as well as more conventional ones like the IRS (inertial) and ground-based radio aids (usually DME and VOR).
It is true that many of the smaller general aviation aircraft are very reliant on GPS.
Slashdot Mirror
I was trying to not comment on this old canard, but this is the third comment in this thread saying this and I couldn't take it any more.
When exactly is "very recently"? "Best models" according to whom?
It is true that under one simple approximation of fluid mechanics -- the one attributed to Bernoulli that discounts non-linear effects, which makes it easy for high-school students to analyse -- insects' wing-loading is too high to be explained. This doesn't even come close to being "our best models of aerodynamics".
If you didn't learn simple fluid mechanics in high-school, blame it on your pathetic school system. After all it's just plain conservation of energy and momentum. If you feel like doing some research, look up the Navier-Stokes equation -- from the 19th century.
After that all that's left is to make little balls of the sugar, put them in little blue glass capsules, stick a fancy latin name on it, then laugh all the way to the bank.
Those hand-drawn schematics of the experiments are beautiful.
I write code. Code under the GPL. The GPL allows me to decide how my code may be used. It allows me to say, "I believe no one should be deprived of the right to look at my code. You can only benefit from my code -- say, by using it in your project -- if your customers have the same rights that I'm giving you."
Don't like the restrictions I put on my code? Fine -- don't use my code.
Nobody is being forced to do anything (or have any viewpoints forced upon them) because I chose to release my code under the GPL. Micros**t will put much greater restrictions on you if you want to use their code, but do you hear idiots like the author of that comment bitch and moan about Micros**t?
Last time I checked, the people in the QA and testing department didn't pay the company for the privilege.
If Person X pays Lindows (and $99 isn't a "nominal" sum) for the privilege of running their Linux distribution, they're a customer and not an employee.
Now the cops want the bookstore to give them a list of all people who bought the book. Where's probable cause? Why should the cops know anything about my reading habits?
If we live in a climate where unpleasant books we buy bring us to the attention of the State, do we still have freedom of expression?
The State no longer will need to ban books. Ashcroft merely says "We will be subpoena'ing all bookstore records for purchasers of Book X."
As the article says, books are different from fertilizer.
I have the right to write a book on "How To Make Methamphetamine".
You have the right to buy and read this book. In a raid on a meth lab, the cops found this book. Now if the state can, in the investigation of this crime (running a meth lab), subpoena the records of the bookstore to get a list of everyone who bought "How To Make Methamphetamine", they know you bought that book even though you have no connection at all with the crime, and were never a suspect.
I think you'll agree that this will tend to make you not buy that book. Your privacy has been invaded.
And this impacts my freedom to write and publish that book.
Any restriction on writing, publishing, selling, and lending books will infringe authors' First Amendment rights. When we pass laws that infringe, we must be very sure that there is a clear and compelling reason to do so, viz. "shouting 'fire!' in a crowded theatre". Routine fact-gathering during a criminal investigation does not qualify (IMHO).
(Note: your video renting records are protected thanks to the Clarence Thomas confirmation brouhaha.)
Of course this doesn't change the main point that if we were to add to the ocean a block of ice 3250 km square by 200 m thick it wouldn't really raise the sea-level.
"I heard" that bin Laden was surprised at the total collapse of the towers.
Then there are STCs - Supplemental Type Certificates. These are authorized post-production modifications. Getting an STC accepted by the FAA is expensive. For example, an STC might allow you to run an OX-5 in a JN-4 Jenny on "blue" 100LL fuel instead of "green" 135 (hypothetical example, I have no idea what an OX-5 likes to drink). If it's not a popular STC, it's possible that the company went defunct and no one bought the STC. If you now want to use blue gas in your Jenny, you can't use the data that's already been given to the FAA proving that it's safe (that was the basis the original STC was issued on) -- you have to start from scratch.
The important things about this: i) no owner can be found (and it provides for a 60 day search period) and ii) the data will be released under FOIA.
The interference could be coming from that new cell tower or that police station or...
Also, most consumer electronic gadgets are pieces of crap when it comes to selectivity and resistance to interference from signals outside their band.
How easily they forget the fundamental axiom of copy protection: if the user can see it, the user can record/copy/save it.
I could just point a camera at the screen and take a picture....
Saw the TV show too. Cool.
GET
Host: www.masenko-media.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Win32)
HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Date: Thu, 14 Feb 2002 00:07:30 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.20 (Unix) mod_bwlimited/0.8 PHP/4.0.6 DAV/1.0.2 mod_log_bytes/0.3 FrontPage/5.0.2.2510 mod_ssl/2.8.4 OpenSSL/0.9.6
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN">
<HTML><HEAD>
<TITLE>404 Not Found</TITLE>
</HEAD><BODY>
<H1>Not Found</H1>
The requested URL
<P>Additionally, a 404 Not Found
error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
<HR>
<ADDRESS>Apache/1.3.20 Server at www.masenko-media.net Port 80</ADDRESS>
</BODY></HTML>
(No Micros**t anywhere on these machines. Cheers!)
Exercise: how many OpenBSD security flaws exist (or have existed) where the weakness was exploited before the team fixed it? What has the severity of the flaw been compared to flaws that have been found in other systems>
There are no programs called ftp, httpd or smtp. FTP, SMTP and HTTP are protocols for which there are many implementations; rarely does a protocol have a bug. Implementations of these protocols may have bugs. So it makes sense to talk of Apache or Sendmail having a bug, but not httpd since there's no such thing.If one particular OS distribution -- one of the *BSDs or a Linux distribution -- runs BIND as root, and another runs it as a user with no privileges except to read files in one particular part of the filesystem, then a flaw in BIND is obviously much more severe in the former than in the latter.
With OpenBSD, when you run BIND you're not just running BIND version 4, you're running a version of BIND 4 that has been audited by the OpenBSD team for flaws. (This is why OpenBSD is still using BIND4 and will continue to do so for a while: the code has been audited, and it works perfectly well providing DNS. Why "upgrade" when the old version isn't missing anything you need?)
All the code that is part of a standard OpenBSD install has been audited. If Apache is found to have a bug, it is not necessarily true that Apache on OpenBSD has a bug. And unfortunately bug fixes that the OpenBSD team makes in standard daemons don't always get accepted into the mainstream code for it.
He (or whoever he got this story from) needs to read a little bit of signal processing. Yes, it sounds very nice, and you can build it, and it's all true... if there's only one such device. You see, what this does to other users of spectrum is raise the noise floor just a bit. No big deal.
But what happens if there's a whole bunch of these devices? Well, let's say you're an FCC licensed user of spectrum. You've been allocated a certain bandwidth. Your channel capacity depends on the bandwidth and the noise floor. If your noise floor goes up, your channel capacity goes down.
Where did that lost channel capacity go? It's being used by these "UWB" devices. As evil as the FCC is, we do need some arbiter of the EM spectrum.
TANSTAAFL, folks. Go read Shannon.
Cringely is an idiot.
Or did you mean some other experiment?
Much easier to hit that suitcase-size reflector with a beam that's more than a mile wide than with one that's pencil thin!
Factoring is not known to be in NP or NP-complete
Life is full of trade-offs. If you want to use free software because of all its plusses - robustness, freedom to hack it, lack of money, whatever - you might have to put up with some pain like building from source. (Although it could be argued that with a complete set of development tools that every free operating system - all the Linux distributions, all the BSDs - comes with, building from source is no pain at all.)
Too often we forget that being in the free software world, whether as a user or a developer, involves a slightly different set of rules from the Micros**t world.
However, satellites can be turned off, even selectively over certain parts of the world. If you were an ordinary sort of paranoid military bloke, would you trust the US not to? DGPS doesn't help you if the birds are silent.
It is true that many of the smaller general aviation aircraft are very reliant on GPS.